Robin Givhan's 'Make It Ours' explores how Virgil Abloh helped redefine fashion

Transcript

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William Brangham: Virgil Abloh was a boundary breaker and a cultural translator, a designer who made streetwear luxurious and luxury feel accessible.

Abloh was the first Black artistic director at Louis Vuitton and the visionary behind the fashion brand Off-White. But beyond the runways, he built bridges between worlds that rarely intersected, hip-hop and high fashion, skate culture and couture.

Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic Robin Givhan has written a new book called “Make It Ours,” which traces Abloh’s unconventional path and the deeper meaning behind his work.

Geoff Bennett sat down with her to talk about Abloh’s legacy, his critics, and how his work helped redefine what fashion can say and who it can speak for.

Geoff Bennett: Robin Givhan, welcome back to the “News Hour.”

Robin Givhan, Author, “Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture With Virgil Abloh”: Thank you so much.

Geoff Bennett: Virgil Abloh, his work spanned music, architecture, skateboarding even, deejaying.

Robin Givhan: Yes.

Geoff Bennett: You described him as a remixer. What about his approach really allowed him to drive innovation and fashion and design?

Robin Givhan: I think some of it was just sort of his generation, right? He came of age at a time of blogs, which sounds so retro today, but blogs and Tumblr and Pinterest and just being able to kind of cut and paste your way through inspiration on a computer.

And he was also a deejay. And a deejay isn’t necessarily writing the music. They’re taking melody and lyrics that someone else has created and they’re putting their own spin on it. They’re remixing it. They’re cutting and pasting it and essentially creating something that has their mark.

He hesitated to call himself a designer. And I think some of that was because he recognized that he had a very different approach to aesthetics than a lot of trained classical designers. And I think it was also a bit protective as well, because he knew he wasn’t a trained designer, and it was a way of sort of fending off the criticism.

Geoff Bennett: And you once critiqued Abloh’s early collections as lacking depth.

Robin Givhan: Yes.

Geoff Bennett: What made you rethink his work, rethink his legacy and have a different understanding of what he was trying to do?

Robin Givhan: Yes, I looked at his work I think through the eyes of a critic who had been sort of assessing the fashion industry for a long time and looking for, OK, have you built a vocabulary that you are using to tell different stories each season? Have you contributed to sort of the progression of the way that clothes look?

And applying those things to Virgil, I sort of came up with this sense of lacking. But when he passed away, I was really struck by the way that people, his fans responded. And it was as if someone that they knew intimately had passed away. And that was very different from the way that people connected with most other designers. And so, for me, there was kind of a tension between those two things.

Geoff Bennett: He really did make streetwear a vessel for luxury. How did he go about collapsing the space between the two? And how did that open up luxury brands for different types of people?

Robin Givhan: Well, I would say that the space was already collapsing. A lot of designers sort of set the stage for Virgil to be able to succeed.

But I — but the thing that really sort of pushed him into the stratosphere and really drew the attention of Vuitton was a collaboration that he did with Nike in 2017. And Nike was losing a bit of market share. It wanted to sort of juice its sales. And it thought that the way to do that was to reissue 10 of its most sort of iconic sneaker styles.

And they worked with Virgil to reimagine them. Nike is a massive, massive company, much bigger than the luxury brands. And the success of that really blasted his name and reputation.

Geoff Bennett: Yes, there’s a real tension in the book between his radical accessibility and the role he had at Louis Vuitton, which is, to your point, sort of the pinnacle of elite fashion.

Robin Givhan: Yes.

Geoff Bennett: Did he see himself as an insurgent or an insider? How did he navigate that dualism?

Robin Givhan: He had this way of talking about how people were both insiders and outsiders sort of simultaneously. It just sort of depended on the context.

And he liked to describe himself as a fashion outsider. But he also was an insider for many of the people who followed him, many of the people who connected with him over social media. And, for them, the fact that he would share prototypes with them, that he wouldn’t just have a one-way conversation on social media, but would respond to their D.M.s, he hired people over Instagram, he invited them to his shows — I mean, the first time I actually really sort of noticed that sensibility was right before Virgil had gotten the appointment at Vuitton.

And it was one of his Off-White shows, his brand, that he was showing in Paris, this narrow little street. And typically the entrance is crowded and there’s a bit of a scrum to go in, but nothing terrible. This particular night, it was like a mosh pit. And I later learned that it was because, earlier in the day, Virgil had had a sneaker event.

And he had basically posted on Instagram, hey, I’m having a big fashion show, come on over. Designers do not do that. The designer of Chanel does not do that. But all of these sneaker fans and Virgil fans just showed up. And it was, yes, a little bit of chaos. But it really showed his desire to be transparent and open doors. And it showed the degree to which people loved him.

Geoff Bennett: Yes.

Virgil Abloh passed away at the age of 41 from a rare form of cancer. You write that his voice stopped mid-sentence. What do you think he was building toward?

Robin Givhan: He was such an interesting sort of centrist when it came to his desire to disrupt fashion. He talked about not being a flamethrower, not being a rebel, someone who didn’t want to disrupt the establishment, but wanted to invite more people to be part of the establishment.

And he got a bit of pushback on that during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. And he started to more publicly discuss issues related to diversity and inclusivity and what it meant to be a Black man in his position. And I think his work became a bit more nuanced and the emotions became, I think, more deeply felt.

So I would have loved to have seen how he would respond in this moment and to see whether or not he became less of a centrist or if he felt that that was, in fact, the most powerful message that he could deliver, or if he felt he needed to switch gears and become maybe not a flamethrower, but a bit more of a rebel.

Geoff Bennett: “Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture With Virgil Abloh.”

Robin Givhan, thank you so much for being here.

Robin Givhan: It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.